The global process of militarization and its concomitant increasing levels of violence have reached such horrific heights that, by the end of the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths were civilian (Catherine Lutz, “Making War and Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104(3):723–735). The memories, experiences, and legacies of state-sponsored violence for one group of civilian survivors are the subject of Victoria Sanford’s new book. Those who subscribe to the notion that human rights are one of anthropology’s most pressing scholarly and political concerns will find much to admire and praise in Sanford’s work.

Sanford carefully, compassionately, and critically documents and analyzes one of the worst atrocities in the recent history of the Americas—the genocide against indigenous Maya populations that left 626 villages destroyed and over 200,000 dead in Guatemala. The author conducted participant-observation with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation as it exhumed several clandestine graves, enabling her to perform what she calls an “excavation of memory” (p. 17) through the collection of survivor testimonies and their public recounting in the work of the Commission for Historical Clarification as well as in Buried Secrets. Sanford uses her multisided ethnography to argue cogently for a reconceptualiztion of genocide from discrete incidents of ethnic massacre to a continuum of experiences of violence (p. 63). This perspective is borne out of several interlocking chapters (3, 4, 5, 6, and 8) in which she elucidates a new understanding of genocide as process, rather than as event. The analytic key to this reformulation of state-sponsored violence is what Sanford calls “the phenomenology of terror,” defined, in the Maya case, by seven phases: (1) premasscre community organizing and experiences with violence; (2) the massacre; (3) postmassacre flight in the mountains; (4) army captures and community surrenders; (5) model villages; (6) ongoing militarization of community life; and (7) living memory of terror (p. 123). Sanford’s framework underscores the enduring terror experienced by Mayas as a result of the increasing militarization of quotidian life for rural people both before and after the massacre.

For those who desire a promising interpretation of Guatemala’s transition to democratic civil society based on the redress of past evils, Sanford delivers. She asserts that through public testimony and recognition of the genocidal atrocities, “the transformation of a private memory creates a public space, however small, where survivors learn to speak; it breaks down to externally imposed understandings and chips away at the power structures imposed through silent negotiation of life-shattering events” (p. 12). Despite the hope Sanford sees in her fieldwork and conveys in her analysis, one must consider the lingering unanswered question Sanford’s own informants raise—the question of impunity. Sanford recounts a horrific memory experienced by a doctor (presumably not Maya) whose patient was murdered as he lay on the operating table. The doctor was forced against the wall while three laughing men opened fire with their machine guns, shooting the patient to death. The doctor explained to Sanford, “The story is about impunity . . . It is the impunity of the act. Those men didn’t even wear masks to cover their faces. They are from here. One of them lives on the same street as I do. I tell you each time I see him on my street, each time he greats me, I relive those moments. . . . I see this man most every day and the impunity is so great, he doesn’t even hang his head” (p. 35). In a nation where forensic anthropologists still receive death threats, massacre survivors and peace activists like Dominga Sic Ruiz often travel with body guards, and increasing criminal violence dominates newspaper reports, the skeptic must ask, is speaking truth to power enough to transform the institutionalized structures of inequality that precipitated ethnic violence in the first place?

In addition to Sanford’s significant intervention into international human rights discourse by reconstituting genocide, true to her promise, she highlights the role of rural Maya survivors as agents of history and justice. By recounting Mayas’ living memories of violence and the struggles for reconciliation, Sanford directly challenges those who, like the Guatemalan army, elite interests, and U.S. academics like David Stoll, have attempted to discredit the testimony of massacre survivors: “The perception of the ‘manipulated’ Maya . . . is intended to erase both community and individual memory and agency. Like the official story upon which it is based, this perception shares the same racist ideational foundation that denies political consciousness and free will to the Maya” (p. 49). In sum, Sanford’s ethnography of genocide is a shining testimony to the will of its survivors as well as to the possibility of anthropologists aiding democratic social projects.

This piece has been difficult to write, not only because of the impossibility of adequately reviewing a complex book in 750 words but also because in the book Lawrence Rosen characterizes some work of mine as slanderous, contradictory, illogical, and ill informed. After reading the book, I was wary of arousing even more vituperation; but I also wanted to respond and to justify myself. Submitting a harsh review would make Rosen’s enemies my allies, but it would also alienate his many friends. With these contradictory personal and situational factors to consider, how should I write the review? My answer is below.

According to Rosen, the situational personalizing of a supposedly objective task (as in the case, of a book review in a professional journal) is a typically Middle Eastern (or, at least, Moroccan) cultural stance. As he says in one of his better aphorisms, “It is the one who notices the thing, not the thing noticed, that counts” (p. 112). Obviously, as my first paragraph shows, this can occur outside the Middle East, as well. Nor are other traits, attitudes, or values to which he draws attention unfamiliar to Western readers: Among them are pervasive ambivalence, a sense of the corruption and the fragility of the social order, never-ending gamesmanship, self-promotion by any avenues possible, shifting alliances in the relentless pursuit of power, and a market model of human relationships. This sounds suspiciously like a listing of the attributes of the public culture of U.S. capitalism in full flower.

A virtue of Rosen’s demanding, smart, insightful, sometimes dull, sometimes gnomic, and often exasperating book is that the author takes these symptoms of modern malaise and gives them a Moroccan flavor, spiced up by a cultural taste for absolutes, saints, case law, tribalism, symbolic reversals, and the verities of Islam, among other things. Morocco is, he says, like the West, but offset at a ten-degree angle: It seems familiar, but is never quite parallel, and becomes more and more different when looked at in depth. The metaphor is striking but hard to apply because cultures are not objects that can be put at angles to one another.

But Rosen is not put off by such difficulties. His sprawling and disjointed text is loosely unified by its similes, because what he really hopes to provide are new, more “supple” and “subtle” tropes that can do justice to the malleability and flexibility he sees as fundamental to Moroccan culture. Anthropologists must, he says, “move away from images of crystalline structures and catalogable logics to new and more suggestive images” (p. 125). For those who are unfamiliar with the debates, what is rejected here is the traditional anthropological fascination with tribal segmentary lineage organization, even though that organization, as an indigenous cultural metaphor, offers precisely the flexibility and malleability desired. But Rosen works primarily among middle-class cosmopolitan urbanites who run their own businesses or work for the state, pursue complex court cases, get divorced, have homes in Europe, and drive Mercedes—or so the sparse ethnography offered seems to indicate. That he should look for something new to reflect the entrepreneurial lives of his informants, then, makes sense.

The central trope (a cognitive anthropologist would call it a “schema”) that he comes up with is that the Moroccan social world (and, by extension, the social order of the Middle East—although not of Islam, despite the overly ambitious claims of the title) resembles an amoeba: ever changing and adapting yet flexible and with a degree of internal cohesion. This is a world that is open-ended, constantly in flux, as the maximizing individuals who make it up are busily extending their social networks by any means possible. Such shapelessness would be extraordinary even for an amoeba. The reason this fluid world does not melt away into the desert is that Moroccan social life is also constituted as a “Great Game” much like chess, in which all of the players know the rules (although the reader never quite finds out what they are), but each plays in a different way. The character type that emerges from this mixed metaphor is curiously bloodless. It consists of “a set of situated and negotiable encounters with others” (p. 59).

There is much to admire in this complicated, amorphous, and challenging book that so resembles the amoeba it describes. The author presents his central argument with vigor; he clearly knows his world, and he has attempted honorably to imagine it anew. At the same time, beneath it all, his understanding of Morocco is surprisingly similar to that of previous writers. As far as I am concerned, that is another positive aspect of his work.

Andrew Orta has written a book that will remain important for some time to come. Not only does he examine the missionizing concept of “inculturation” and distinguish it from liberation theology but he also manages to explore the relationship between localization and global culture. These are not easy concepts, and yet Orta demonstrates great facility in handling them, in making them clear to those who may not be involved in missionary studies, and in moving from one level to analysis to another.

Orta sets the stage for his “ethnography of . . . (the) complex situation” that is inculturation in his preface: “In some cases missionaries are in the awkward position of encouraging Aymara to celebrate the very ritual practices they or their predecessors effectively eradicated. And so, some five centuries after their arrival in the New World to spread the Christian message at the expense of indigenous cultures, foreign Catholic missionaries at the turn of the millennium find themselves teaching the Ayamara their own culture.” [p. vii] Orta views inculturation as a manifestation of local reactions to globalization, part of the rise of ethnic politics and other local resistance movements to the spread of world systems and its consequences.

Orta sums up the core argument of his book quite clearly: “ It is that local places, like the communities where I conducted my research, point beyond themselves—that ‘locals’ make their lives fully assuming, and oftentimes requiring, ‘outside’ influences, which include, in this case, locally resident missionization”[ p. vii]. This awareness of the connection between the local and the global and their interdependence makes this book exciting in a manner I have not noticed in many recent ethnographies or theoretical works. This work is, in fact, both ethnography and theoretical treatise. I would go so far as to state that it is a model for future ethnographers.

Orta manages to choose just the exact example on which to build his theoretical model. He provides great ethnographic detail to ground his theoretical insights in reality. As one familiar with missionary studies but only generally familiar with Andean cultures, I found myself agreeing with his theoretical insights while learning a good deal about Aymara life and thought. Orta brings his work alive with his keen immersion in the life of the people, a result of many field trips and much reflection on that work.

Orta quite correctly places the theology of inculturation within the broader context of efforts of the Catholic Church and, I would add, Protestant congregations as well, to “catechize culture.” He means by this happy phrase the effort “to celebrate and incorporate cultural differences”[p. viii] as part of a universal Christian identity that sees in local practice a means of worship of the one true God that existed before Christianity.

Three aspects of inculturation come in for detailed analysis: inculturation spans a number of levels; inculturation is a local manifestation of the macrolevel stress upon identity politics and ethnicity; and inculturation is connected with the entire history of evangelization movements in Latin America. It emerged as missionaries began to see that liberation theology was not working on the pastoral level. A greater appreciation of local culture, they felt, was required to become more effective at the grassroots level.

Much of the religion practiced at the grassrootslevel, however, is inextricably bound with Catholicism. Finding the “original” Aymara practice becomes an exercise in ethnographic reconstruction, often ironically imposing uniformity on the Aymara that never existed in so-called traditional times. It is a strength of Orta’s work that he often unearths ironies and contradictions in inculturation practice.

Orta’s work is amazingly subtle and fine textured. He presents detailed analysis and skips easy answers or overbroad generalizations. As one who has worked on inculturation for many years, I found his work not only sound but also provocative and inspiring. His overall theoretical perspective is clearly stated and well formulated. His ethnography is clear and detailed.

If I have one significant reservation, it is that Orta does not explore the relationship between anthropologists and missionaries and their similarities. Many of the assets and liabilities found in missionary practice of the theology of inculturation are found in the anthropological work that has inspired the theology of inculturation. Additionally, Orta does not look at many significant works from Africa nor does he examine the generally acknowledged founder of inculturation, Pedro Arupe, the Jesuit.

Nevertheless, Orta has produced an extraordinary work, both ethnography and theoretical treatise. It will inspire future work in the important field of missionary studies. Its implications go far beyond the region of Latin America.

In the 1950s and sixties, a group of Aboriginal people from the Western Desert were resettled by the Australian government in reserves, to be “assimilated” into Australian society. To quote Fred R. Myers, these people

had and still have a rich ceremonial life in which songs, myths, and elaborate body decorations, as well as constructed objects, are combined in performances that reenact the somewhat mysterious events that gave the world its physical form and social order. . . .It was in 1971 at Papunya that a group of Pintupi, Arrernte, Anmatyerre, and Warlpiri men began to turn traditional designs involved in ritual and body decoration and cave painting into a new and partly commoditized form—acrylic paintings on flat surfaces. [p. 2]

Myers was there almost at the beginning and has followed the story of these paintings and the men who make them for over 30 years, into the present. To do justice to the rich, detailed description and penetrating, thoughtful analysis he has made of his experiences is impossible in a brief review, so I will just suggest some of the many topics debated in social science analyses of art that he has clarified.

Do non-Western artists make their works with an aesthetic intention? Myers settles this much-debated issue with data. He documented hundreds of consecutive paintings made by the same artists over a period of two years and shows how the artists experimented with forms and designs in the same way Western artists do in the name of aesthetics.

Myers takes seriously the increasingly common idea that the making of artworks involves more people than the painter alone and shows in great detail the sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflictual arrangements through which the work gets done. In this case, he focuses particularly on the networks of government officials, art bureaucrats, art dealers, and collectors who jointly collaborated to create a market for objects that eventually came to have considerable value.

Myers emphasizes the important role played by the state, in a way that goes far beyond the usual clichés. In this case, a left-wing government found it useful, and compatible with its larger aims, to put money into the programs that supported the painters. Later, a conservative government found the painters and their work useful as a symbol of a new Australian identity that could be advertised during the 2000 Olympic Games.

Myers shows that a painting is not a stable object about which one can theorize. Not at all. It is many different objects, depending on the situation it is found in, who does what with it, and who makes what of it. The most dramatic shift in the meaning of an Aboriginal acrylic painting is the change from a (more or less) ritual object that embodies the painter’s ownership of territories in the desert, and whose authenticity in this regard is what gives the painting value, to an example of contemporary Australian art, valuable for its display of aesthetic qualities highly regarded in worldwide contemporary art circles. Myers avoids the trap of trying to decide which one of these (or the several other possibilities he discusses) the painting really is and accepts that it will be different things at different times and in different organizational settings.

There is more, a lot more. This is a big book, filled with detailed descriptions and histories, maybe more than would interest someone who does not have a particular interest in Australian Aboriginal life. But the book delivers on its implicit promise to make it worth one’s while to learn about all of that background and pays off in a deep understanding of how art gets to be art. This is an understanding that can be profitably transported to other times, places, and kinds of art.

A minor quibble from a sociologist. Myers seems to think that sociology consists of Pierre Bourdieu. He would have found, and may still find, that the works of many other sociologists have something quite compatible to offer to his analytic approach. For starters, I mention Raymonde Moulin’s study of the value-making activities that constitute the French art market and Richard Peterson’s and David Grazian’s studies of the problem of artistic authenticity, in U.S. country-and country and -western music in the one case and in Chicago blues clubs in the other.

Most of all, Myers’s book shows that there is just no substitute for solid fieldwork.

A review of these two books may, at first glance, seem an unlikely pairing. One, the volume by Karen Merrill, a historian, examines the long relationship between the U.S. federal government and its representatives and western cattle ranchers up to and following the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934. The second, authored by anthropologist Nathan Sayre, chronicles the transformation of a grassland area in southern Arizona to a working ranch and, in the 1980s, to a wildlife refuge. The apparent disconnect between the two books is, however, only apparent, for a close reading indicates the areas of intersection and complementarity between the two.

Merrill’s study focuses on property—the ways in which people conceive of it, the areas of contention in those conceptualizations, and the negotiations in which government and ranchers have engaged in search of workable definitions. She initially reminds readers that property is not a thing but, rather, a set of relationships between humans and that, if one is to grasp the sometimes bitter and contentious issues of property ownership and use in the west, one must begin with this understanding. In this she is surely correct, and with this as a starting point one can begin to appreciate the various cultural meanings that have attached to property relationships throughout this history. The area of great contention and negotiation during most of this history concerns public lands, a vast acreage that includes significant portions of most western states. That the government came to hold and manage these lands is not at issue here, but manage them it has, and their availability for use by ranchers and other interests who do not hold title to them is at the heart of Merrill’s discussion. In the earlier period of the range, appropriate ownership and stewardship were matters of differing interpretations. Should the federal government continue to manage these lands, or should they revert to state ownership and management, thus, better reflecting local interests and control? These and other conflicts persisted through the early decades of the 20th century. In the meantime, the range was deteriorating, overstocked, and often managed only for short-term gain. Clearly, remedial action was required.

In 1934, at the height of the New Deal and the devastating effects of “dust-bowl” drought, the U.S. Congress passed the Taylor Act, named for the Colorado congressman who sponsored it. With its passage, the act firmly established the responsibility of the federal government as conservator and manager of the public-lands range. For ranchers, it extended a regime of access and fee schedules that had been instituted decades earlier with the establishment of the national forest system and creation of the U.S. Forest Service. Public lands in the west were now under the jurisdiction of federal managers, and the negotiations between them and ranchers were conducted under a new set of guidelines that were to be governed by two principles: “highest use” and sustainability.

In a discussion of the contending interpretations and cultural meanings of property, Merrill identifies what became and still resonates as an issue dividing policy makers and ranchers. This is the contention over “rights” and “privileges” as use of public lands pertains to grazing. The Taylor Act states that the granting of a grazing preference (a fee-based permit to a rancher) “shall not create any right, title, interest, or estate in or to the lands”. This would seem to be quite clear, but in practice it often becomes murky. Consider, for example, when a rancher decides to sell deeded land. The allotment held for the adjoining public land valorizes the rancher’s own property significantly. The case might well be that ranching would be an impossible venture were one not to have access to the public parcel. This gray area remains up to the present day, and the belief persists that an allottee in some way “owns” the leased public land. Here readers are brought to a difficulty in Merrill’s insistence on a definition of property that would exclude its “thingness.” For property is land in the mind of the rancher; it has dimensions; it can be valorized; it can be conserved or degraded. It may be a cultural construction that the rancher imbues with notions of tradition and a way of life, but it still is the basis for making a living. Because of this, the abstraction of property as relationship may become a conceptual distinction of little immediate concern for the rancher.

Somewhat puzzling is Merrill’s discussion of the conflict that arose in the 1940s, a few years after the Taylor Act was passed. She details the reemergence of a position by stockmen arguing for the cession of public lands to private interests. She asserts this to have been a serious goal by ranchers—or, at least, by some—as articulated by the Joint Livestock Committee on Public Lands, an entity that embodied interests of both cattle and sheep ranchers. She notes that “while the Taylor Grazing Act was a ‘stockmen’s bill’ if there ever was one … it also produced the expectation among some ranchers that it would generate real property rights in the public range, and when it did not, the livestock organizations leaned further toward a political agenda of privatization” (p. 194). A few pages later, however, she relates how quickly the movement toward privatization dissipated, suggesting that this was a result of “internal opposition” among stockmen (p. 198). I am suspicious of this argument; the renewed call for cession came in 1946 as the Grazing Division was about to be morphed into the new Bureau of Land Management, initially a downsized agency. If stockmen wanted to establish new ground rules for their use and for government management of the range, floating the issue of cession of public lands would seem a good way to open opportunities for influencing policy within the new entity.

Finally, Merrill says little about the other phrase in the Taylor Act, noted above, the principle of “highest use.” Although, initially, this phrase may have been intended to refer to various uses involving productive enterprise, such wording is always open to subsequent interpretations, determined by historical and sociological factors. In the case of “highest use,” it was only a matter of time before the principle of “multiple use” implying a hierarchy of “uses” not confined to production became established in a 1960 law. This principle, of course, is still extant and a source of much present contention.

Sayre has provided a meticulous and full account of the changes that have been wrought in a single valley, the Altar Valley, in southern Arizona. In this study he is not dealing with public-land ranching; rather, the valley was held for a lengthy period by successive owners and was devoted to beef production for most years during the century before its transfer to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USF&WS) in 1985 for establishment of what became the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. The proximate reason for the creation of the refuge was habitat restoration to enable the (re)introduction of an iconic bird, the masked bobwhite, a species absent from the area since about 1900.

Again, in Sayre’s study, readers are acquainted with the prevailing struggle in the west over the presumed environmental effects of cattle grazing and their impacts on the health of the range and the native flora and fauna. In the view of bureaucrats who promoted the purchase and restoration program for the valley, the issue of grazing’s devastating effects and the incompatibility of cattle and certain native species was unquestioned. Although the reintroduction efforts aimed at reestablishing a viable population of masked bobwhite have been unsuccessful, the creation of the refuge as an attraction and wildlife viewing area continues to be promoted.

Sayre’s theoretical approach to the issues under discussion begins with David Harvey’s conceptualization of the built environment under capitalism, focusing on the accumulation function of capital. In assessing the impact of an increasingly urbanizing landscape in southern Arizona, he also employs Neil Smith’s notion of a “rent gap,” in which development for residential growth has displaced ranching, even in areas more remote from populated cities. This latter consideration is taken up in chapter 5 of the book and could easily constitute a study separate from the main thrust.

Another conceptual thread, one that, I confess, I am less persuaded by, is the invoking of Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation of “species of capital” in the form of symbolic, economic, and bureaucratic capitals, all of which are be given “value” by those who recognize and express them. Although introduced in the preface to the book, this notion is not consistently applied in Sayre’s discussion of the interplay among interests that are represented in the various transformations that the valley has undergone during the century under investigation. Only late in the study in a chapter dealing with touristic aspects of the refuge does he return to the topic of wildlife as bureaucratic capital.

The strength of the book lies in its earlier chapters, wherein the story of cattle ranching in the valley is treated in a manner that illustrates the uneven and changeable approaches employed, not only toward enhanced production but also toward environmental conservation. The connection to economic forces outside the region is also carefully drawn in this account, which details the role of speculators in cattle and, later, in real estate. The groundwork for the entry of USF&WS into the picture is, thus, well presented.

A problem with the study is the chapter that variously touches on aspects of the present state of the refuge, including tourism. If the intention of establishing the refuge has been to restore “nature” and to present this fictive representation for the enjoyment of a public that increasingly seeks such attractions, it requires of this study a more careful examination of how that is being undertaken and accomplished. Instead, the account is piecemeal and fragmented, typified by an 11-page ethnography of bird-watching. If this is to be the demonstration of the utility of examining “symbolic capital,” it falls short.

Both of the studies under review are thoroughly researched and documented. The authors have presented insights that suggest further examination of the continuing problems of private use and government management in the wild, and not so wild, lands of the west. The complementarity of the two studies lies in their attention to the most vexing issues that have beset land use and management in the region for over a century—the competing interests of productive activity and public values, the latter encompassing environmental conservation, habitat maintenance, species protection, and tourism. In taking readers through the history of relations between stockmen and the federal government, in one case, and in narrowing the focus to the single instance of a remote valley, in the other case, Merrill and Sayre enrich a literature that has grown rapidly as researchers seek understandings of the west that go beyond popular myth and stereotype.

In this edited volume David Maybury-Lewis brings together 11 essays that raise timely issues related to indigenous peoples in newly defined pluriethnic states across Latin America. A theme running throughout the book is the way in which indigenous peoples have redefined and politicized their identities and achieved greater visibility and agency in their relationship with the state. This theme is explored in three different settings: situations of violence against indigenous peoples, situations of conflict between indigenous peoples and the state, and situations in which indigenous organizations play a part in civil society.

Jennifer Schirmer, Maria Clemencia Ramirez, Jean Jackson, and Bartholomew Dean all explore the issue of indigenous peoples in situations of violence and political conflict. Schirmer develops the notion of “sanctioned Maya,” in other words, the way the military defined who is an appropriate Maya in its reordering and disciplining of indigenous community life. This author contributes an insightful perspective on an imposed identity in a situation of extreme political violence. Ramirez explores problems of juridical and political recognition of cabildos in the Colombian Amazon, where emergence of new ethnic groups challenges definitions of ethnic belonging amid violent situations of paramilitarism and drug trafficking.

Jackson studies indigenous organizing across Colombia and the significant constitutional changes there regarding indigenous rights. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples continue to face conflicts over land demarcation, political violence, drug trafficking, and clashes over development projects. Interestingly, the emergence of indigenous federations created among indigenous peoples the possibility of recognizing an identity that transcended the local community. Dean’s analysis of Peruvian Amazonian indigenous societies highlights the struggle against state-sponsored ecological abuses, discrimination, and violence. Although the emergence of indigenous federations has mobilized indigenous peoples, the state has been slow at recognizing cultural specificity, and development schemes do not contemplate the native peoples’ interests.

Relations between indigenous peoples and the state have been marked by opposing practices of assimilation and recognition of cultural specificity. Paul H. Gelles examines the Peruvian Andean case, in which indigenous identity is shaped by state intervention and the interplay of an Andean worldview in conjunction with local, national, and transnational factors (economic, cultural, and social). In the Ecuadorian case, Theodore Macdonald Jr. explains the unlikely alliance between Indians and the military and the redefinition of ethnic groups as “nationalities.” He also documents how indigenous organizations in Ecuador are active in mobilizing their constituents across class and ethnic lines.

Jerome M. Levi presents an analysis of microregional politics and examines the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and Tarahumara organizing in Chihuahua. His historical account of the Zapatista movement sheds light on how indigenous peoples become politicized as a result of complex relations with mestizo politicians, the Catholic Church, Protestant groups, and peasant unions. Maybury-Lewis focuses on Brazil, where indigenous peoples are a small minority and where the state has combined practices of assimilation, protection, and militarization of indigenous territories. In this case, demarcation and protection of indigenous lands interfere with developmentalist projects and colonization. In response to threats to their territory, Brazilian Indians have received the support of NGOs and the Church, but the geographic and cultural difficulties of organizing federations are significant.

Although the Kuna of Panama constitute a case of strong ethnic identity and autonomy, the state has failed to support their attempt at self-governance. James Howe describes how the Kuna developed political strategies to fend off major development and tourist enterprises that threatened their territory and autonomy. Although they have strengthened their organizations and sense of agency, they face paramilitiaries, environmental degradation, and changes that threaten their cultural continuity. A similar, but less successful case is found in Paraguay, where, as Richard Reed describes, there is an absence of national indigenous organizations, and leaders have been co-opted by political parties and subject to paternalistic politics.

Bret Gustafson questions the ways in which neoliberal culturalism has dealt with the indigenous population in Bolivia. He highlights the complexities of alliances and tensions between indigenous organizations, political parties, the state, and NGOs. Gustafson, for Bolivia, and Dean, in the Peruvian case, consider bilingual education as a tool for achieving cultural survival and civic participation. Despite the differences between Bolivia and Peru, in both cases the presence of NGOs, indigenous federations, and human-rights groups granted legitimacy to intercultural bilingual education. In the case of Bolivia, Gustafson asserts that “Indians—now as much protagonists as objects—are being redefined from class subjects into ‘intercultural’ citizens” (p. 276).

In all of the cases addressed in this book what is contested is how much power Indians might wield to face major threats to their territory, identity, and livelihood. This volume builds on the growing literature on indigenous peoples and on their organizations and relations with the state, and it contributes insightful articles by authors with extensive fieldwork experience in Latin America.

Research on political violence and human rights violations, at its best, provides a carefully delineated description and analysis of what really happened in specific cases and how such violence was experienced. To do so, it must be assured of the veracity of its sources and detail the structures of political violence in a way that deepens understanding of the extraordinarily complex legacies of violence on vulnerable communities. A number of books on Guatemala written in the 1990s have provided such depth through their nuanced ethnographic narrative, testimonial power, and analytical scope.

In Paradise in Ashes, Beatriz Manz follows in the tradition of narratives of political violence in Guatemala and recounts the tragic saga of several of the 116 settler families of the cooperative of Santa Maria Tzejá. The author begins her story with the settlement of the village by Highland Maya peasants seeking land in the 1970s and takes readers through the following two decades, showing how the villagers were able to prevail through the repression by the Guatemalan military, the travails of massacre, the flight to Mexico, and the return to rebuild the village and the lives they had left behind. The villagers’ stories are accompanied at various points by discussions of the larger political context within which their experiences took place. For the layperson, Manz’s narrative provides a general overview and, at times, moving testimonial about a very repressive period in Guatemala’s history. For those concerned with more than an overview, a number of key elements are missing in Manz’s narrative.

As the village was one of the pioneering cooperatives in the Ixcan area founded by liberation theologists in the late 1960s, one would have expected a more detailed discussion of the cooperative itself, why people joined it, and its relations to the Catholic Church and to liberation theology. Instead of a nuanced analysis, readers are told simply that villagers joined the cooperative because “they felt that the hand of God, like a miracle, had touched and guided them” (p. 77).

Because the village was a critical site for the reemergence of the guerrilla movement in the 1970s, one would have expected to find a more in-depth discussion of who the guerrillas were and how their entry into the village affected local social and cultural relations and village–army and village–guerrilla relations before, during, and after the army’s brutal massacre campaign in the early 1980s. Manz rarely provides details about the nature either of the army’s repression and its penetration of village life or of the guerrillas’ counterresponses, both of which often involved differing degrees of complicity among villagers.

Because Manz followed the cooperative through its early days, the violence, the diaspora in Mexico, and the return to Guatemala, she might also have provided a discussion of the evolution of the social and cultural dynamics of the village as the conditions within which its members found themselves changed. Little rich description is offered of life either in the village or in the refugee camps. Manz is certainly to be commended for envisioning her role as “an advocate for marginalized people” (p. 5), but compassion does not substitute for analysis, and she ignores the implications of inconvenient detail that suggest a complexity and ambivalence about the villagers’ experiences and recollections, which would have greatly enhanced readers’ understanding. Such a paucity of detail on the nature of village life and the repression in the 1970s and 1980s leads, unfortunately, to an oversimplification in describing village divisions before, during, and after the repression and in tracing how and in what ways army violence and guerrilla executions changed relations within the village.

Finally, although Manz asserts that “an engaged ethnographer should report about human rights violations in a tone that will allow events as much as possible to inform the reader” (pp. 11–12), she does not provide enough information about the villagers, the army, or the guerrillas to enable readers to make informed decisions about the material she offers in a piecemeal manner.

The lack of ethnographic precision and the absence of context for the 1970s might be explained by Manz’s admission that, because of her justifiable fears for her respondents, she either took no notes or made “undecipherable,” coded field notes during her visits in that period (p. 248). But this does not explain the lack of ethnographic detail and precision about the 1980s and 1990s, when she says she conducted taped interviews. If, at times, readers are offered quite moving testimony about villager experiences, an unexplained imprecision characterizes the interviews: we are told of a “vast” number of interviews but not how many (p. 248); we are rarely told when or where an interview took place or provided any sense of whether or how the respondent is representative of the village or of what was asked; indeed, one has no sense of the range and types of people interviewed, as no list or overall description of the respondents is provided.

In this monograph, her second on Tonga, Helen Morton Lee reports the results of an extensive research project centered on the Tongan community of Melbourne, Australia, and touching on several other overseas Tongan communities. Although the research is concerned with people of all ages, it is focused more on younger people growing up in the diasporic Tongan community. The work is an extension of Lee’s earlier work on children and youth in Tonga itself.

Ultimately, the book is about the impact of migration of Tongans into new cultural milieus on Tongan notions of identity. For younger people growing up outside of Tonga, albeit inside a Tongan community, Tongan identity is as ambiguous as it is important. For most of the book, Lee presents an almost overwhelming variety of people’s perspectives on identity and their experiences of life in the diaspora. Repeating the varying accounts presented in the monograph is neither possible nor desirable in this review; indeed, so untamed is the material marshaled in the work that I am unsure that I would offer a précis if space permitted. The bottom line is that people struggle with new cultural forms and with each other over identity, and although most Tongans think being Tongan is important, little consensus exists on the details of that identity.

The most interesting part of the monograph for me is Lee’s use of chat room- and email-generated discourse. Although the status of such discourse might be somewhat clouded by the lack of attachment to an easily identifiable source (i.e., people are not necessarily directly or practically responsible to others for what they have to say), the discourse is nonetheless important. Not only do participants in the study get space in the text but the use of first-person narrative is also successful and, at times, compelling.

The research consultants’ voices are one of several ways in which experiences and perspectives are presented throughout the volume. Also, throughout the book, Lee offers observations on contextualizing and contributing factors to identity formation but little in the way of conclusions. Indeed, the concluding chapter of the work is entitled “Looking Forward” and expressly states the author’s unwillingness to offer conclusions except to suggest that change is inevitable. Although this may be justified by the monograph and the research on which it is based, I found it profoundly disappointing that a scholar of such obvious rigor and talent as Lee could not, or would not, draw some kind of conclusion. If you will indulge me, I will spend the rest of this review on this issue, and I do so not because Tongans Overseas is a weak monograph but, rather, the opposite.

In the context of the debates that have raged over postmodern critiques of the social sciences, a grudgingly respectful reaction to the death of the master (and even minor) narrative has occurred in the form of an empiricism that dares not end in conclusion. Certainly, plenty of recent work on Tonga is sophisticated empirically, theoretically, or both, but it steadfastly fails to yield even an empirical generalization, let alone a conclusion (beyond the observation that conclusions are passé). Although I have sympathy for the philosophical foundations of this position, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the results. The problem is not, as so many Jurassic-period colleagues claimed, that a postmodern position means that everyone’s conclusions are of equal standing. Rather, the difficulty lies in practices developing within the discipline that lead to this dearth of conclusions. Throughout my reading of Lee’s monograph, I wanted to know how many people were experiencing what, when, and with whom? At the risk of raising the specter of Durkheim, is there nothing that can be said of variation within a culture or community other than that it occurs? Surely patterns of variation are still worth describing, assessing, and analyzing. Unfortunately, in this book, Lee does rather too much of the first task and not nearly enough of the latter two, and in this, Tongans Overseas has far too much company of late.

In his 1985 monograph Good Company and Violence (University of California Press), Bruce Knauft reconciled the seemingly paradoxical conjunction among Gebusi, a lowland Papua New Guinean people, of an ethos of exuberant friendliness and an exceptionally high level of homicide resulting from the revenge killing of sorcerers. Admittedly, that excellent study foregrounded the exotic. Elsewhere, based on the same field experience, Knauft reported ways in which Gebusi expressed desire for different, primarily imagined, experiences. He wrote of an innovative genre of séance that “engaged a new set of tensions that seethed beyond the Gebusi horizon: the proliferation of trade goods, the development of wage labor, and their conflict with Gebusi notions of kinship and exchange” (Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology, Routledge, 1996:209–110).

In 1998, 16 years after leaving the field, Knauft returned to Gebusi. In the book under review he describes his encounter with people for whom what had once been imagined had assumed a semblance of reality. One-fifth of the total of 615 Gebusi people now lived within half-an-hour’s walk from a small government station at Nomad. Comfortably positioned on their own land, they had easy access to the institutions of church and state as well as to people from six neighboring language groups who also lived near Nomad. Here, were Christian missions, trade stores, a local market, competitive sports, a community school, a health clinic, officers of the law, and expressions of Papua New Guinean nationalism in the form of Independence Day celebrations. In the context of these institutions and opportunities, Gebusi became, in Knauft’s words, “locally modern” (p. 237).

But what did “locally modern” entail? Changes had transpired in all facets of Gebusi lives. All-night séances at which sorcerers were identified no longer occurred. The rate of homicide had plummeted. Ritual homosexuality had been abandoned. Women had assumed a more public role in church, at the market, and in their greater freedom with respect to marriage arrangements. Activities had become more regularized, with set times for markets, church services, school, and even feasts and “parties.” Accompanying these changes, people were less exuberant than they had been. In church, in school, at the market, and in their encounters with the law, they appeared nonassertive, as willing subordinates to the more powerful, as passively waiting for a future that was unlikely to ever materialize. As “local actors in marginal circumstances” (p. 245), Gebusi had willingly exchanged their past for an uncertain future. This is Knauft’s central and oft-repeated theoretical position. The Gebusi response to their changed circumstances was neither entrepreneurial nor subversive. Rather, it was characterized by an “active passivity” that Knauft labels “recessive agency” (p. 40).

The ways in which people respond to altered circumstances are diverse, contextual, and historically constrained. The underlying processes are neither well understood nor well theorized. Knauft’s position is that the choices people make—even to be passive—are central to those processes. But in three areas I am uncomfortable with his account.

Knauft has remarkably little to say of the four-fifths of Gebusi people who have chosen not to live near Nomad and who do not, on a daily basis, encounter the modern institutions represented there. If these people have not succumbed to passivity, then Knauft’s account of Gebusi is partial and does not address the possibility that in different locations the same people adopt very different public faces.

Even for those who live near Nomad, and despite some caveats, Knauft may have overstated his case. He provides a scatter of vignettes that tell of individuals who have been far from passive. Perhaps most tellingly, the public skits performed at Independence Day celebrations are interpreted by Knauft as self-mocking, as disparaging past ways that have been put aside. Alternatively, they might be understood as deeply ironic, and irony, of course, can provide a forceful critique of the present.

Knauft writes engagingly of the police, pastors, and schoolteachers at Nomad. At one level, their activities provide contexts for expressions of “recessive agency” by Gebusi. At another level, these men and their families are themselves exceptionally isolated from mainstream Papua New Guinea: living in “a context devoid of economic development and with no roads to elsewhere” (p.139), they are beholden, for their livelihoods, to what are surely caricatures of truly modern institutions. The scale is different, but these people, too, might be understood as willing subordinates to the more powerful, as passively waiting for a future that seems unlikely to ever materialize. What Knauft reads as particular to Gebusi may be an instance of a more general pattern.

In Laughter Out of Place, Donna Goldstein provides a powerful ethnography of urban poverty in Brazil, contextualizing the hardships in the lives of a domestic worker named Gloria and her 14 dependents within the wider social class organization of Rio de Janeiro. Goldstein investigates the consequences of class segregation by unpacking the economic abuse of domestic workers, gang violence and drug warfare, child labor and neglect, and out-of-place coping strategies such as laughter in the face of misery and sensuality in the face of repression. A critical strength of her work is her inclusion of an edifying review of the history in which inter-class relationships have developed in Brazil and an analysis of how Brazil has been depicted in earlier scholarship.

Goldstein addresses many of the criticisms of ethnographies of poverty, recognizing the need to protect her informants from blame for the harsh circumstances of their lives by consistently emphasizing the historical and social circumstances of their actions. She gives the accounts of informants only after she has carefully constructed the wider picture of class, race, gender, sexuality, and violence in Brazil. Although the reader is given a true sense of the horror of the reality of her informants’ lives, this view is not voyeuristic. The ethnographic doorway opens only after one has been prepared to see the life of Gloria, her children, and her community situated within a history of local, national, and international inequalities.

One way that Goldstein succeeds in revealing the interactions between Brazil’s social classes is by illustrating how the high quality of middle-class life is dependent on undervaluing the domestic labor of poor women such as Gloria. Grossly underpaid female domestic workers free those in the middle class from chores that would otherwise interfere with their full social lives. Goldstein argues that to avoid doing their own laundry, cooking their own food, or cleaning their own homes, middle-class citizens uphold the status quo of a national minimum wage that amounts to less than US$100 a month. Female domestic workers who earn the minimum wage or less are often the sole providers for their children, and keeping them at the edge of survival ensures that the system will continue into the next generation. While the female heads of household are out struggling during very long and tiring days to bring home the minimum requirements for survival, their children are left to fend for themselves. Female children are often given the responsibility of caring for their younger siblings. Daughters of single, female domestic workers often carry on the patterns of undercompensated wage labor and high birth rates in their early teens.

Whereas adolescent females begin their journeys into cultural and biological motherhood at a young age, young males are often attracted to gangs. In the face of limited work opportunities, selling illegal drugs and gaining brotherhood in the gangs that control such business in the shantytown are attractive to young men. Regrettably, membership in these gangs can be fatal to both gang members and other community members caught in the crossfire when competition between gangs and revenge killings cause outbreaks of violence. This violence can eliminate productive adults in the community, further adding to the burden of those that survive. Considering the corruption and ineffectiveness of public law enforcement officers, a peaceful and conscientious local gang leader can actually ensure the safety of a community. By contrast, having a gang leader who offends other gangs or who does not regulate where drug sales take place can be disastrous.

Although laughter may not be as central a theme to the overall work as implied by the book’s title, Goldstein demonstrates how humor in the face of unfathomable horrors can serve as a means of empowering her informants. Laughter is a communicative release. It takes the edge off the misery of everyday life for the poor. Laughter in the face of death or rape shows how displays of emotion are not based solely on instincts and hormones but also on complex interactions between environment and behavior in which race, class, and gender are revealed by class-appropriate variations in affect. Within this milieu, laughing at a friend’s privation does not express lack of compassion but is a method of coping with the persistent brutality of Brazil’s class system. Unlike the popular Brazilian soap operas that dramatize middle-class life, tragedy for shantytown residents is debauched because suffering adversity with solemnity is inane.

Is Zambia “Africa”? Is the Copperbelt Zambia? Does the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute equal Africanist anthropology? This ambitious and insightful book leads to questions such as these. What is an ethnographic account of urban Zambian life is at the same time also a critique of anthropological theory in Africa and a discussion of how “Africans” understand modernity. Author James Ferguson conflates the Copperbelt and urban Africa in ways that are frustrating to the reader while also raising significant and exciting questions about the study of contemporary African society.

The problem of conflation is apparent in the very first sentences: “In the mid-1960s, everyone knew, Africa was ‘emerging.’ And no place was emerging faster or more hopefully than Zambia” (p. 1). Although Ferguson immediately moves into a quite detailed overview of what happened in Zambia between the 1960s and the 1990s, he continues to refer to Africa, in general, presumably seeing Zambia as a model for what has occurred on the continent. He is less concerned with the economic and political developments of the period than with what they have meant. He argues that a “myth of modernity” was accepted both by social scientists and by local people themselves.

For Ferguson, the “modern” and “modernization” are not simply concepts used by scholars. Rather, they have become key concepts in the minds of urban Zambians who understood that by moving to the Copperbelt and working in the copper mines, they were part of a significant process of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization.

But Ferguson is writing more than an ethnography of change on the Copperbelt. He is also concerned with the anthropological theory that derived from research carried out on the Copperbelt, under the auspices of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, that led to the Manchester School of social anthropology, with its focus on social change and urbanization. He argues that anthropologists became attached to a “metanarrative of emergence and progress” and that “scholarly thinking in Africa and elsewhere continues to be haunted ... by the imagined teleologies of the modern” (p. 16). Thus, he offers his book not as an ethnography of a particular locale or set of people, but as a way of “getting around the whole terrain of an urban Africa that continues to be haunted by ideas of modernity” (p. 21).

Ferguson uses several distinct techniques to accomplish this task. First, he uses rich ethnographic detail, based on his research on Copperbelt men over a period of years. This material shows that men who had assumed a degree of permanence to their lives in the urban setting experienced a quite different reality in the late 1980s and found that they were unable to maintain the type of lifestyle that they had expected. In several chapters, he also provides inset boxes with direct observations and comments on those observations made by his field assistant. Elsewhere, he presents a set of specific cases of individuals and also quotes from letters he received from some men the appendix contains more of these letters.

Ferguson also makes clear his theoretical concerns through several stylistic devices. In particular, he uses chapter titles and headings that refer to Rhodes-Livingstone Institute publications, such as “Open Systems and Closed Mines” (p. 17). He discusses specific theoretical perspectives that were based on earlier research in urban Zambia, and he engages in a critique of those perspectives. Borrowing the concept of a “full house” of strategies from Stephen Jay Gould, he argues that, contrary to the views of a linear trajectory from traditional to urban and modern, contemporary Zambians, instead, have followed a wide variety of strategies:“I suggest that the way to get beyond the limitations of linear and teleological accounts is to give full weight to the wealth of coexisting variation at any given moment of the historical process. ... The central reality is rather a complex range of actual strategies followed by actually existing Copperbelt residents over a period of time” (p. 80). He continues by arguing that “the more vital parts of the bush of residential strategy today lie ... in modes of straddling the urban-rural divide that seem, to the modernist imagination, as out of date as a trilobite, or a bacterium” (p. 81).

In this discussion, Ferguson refers to very little of the literature that focuses on migration and rural–urban linkages in West Africa. He almost seems to suggest that he is the first researcher to notice that many urban residents follow strategies later in life that involve some type of connection to rural communities, and the first to observe that no single linear trajectory runs from tradition to modernity, whereas, in fact, a considerable literature exists on this subject.

Nevertheless, his discussion of urban culture and the meanings that Zambians themselves associate with their situations leads to a set of significant conclusions about the ways in which people themselves have accepted ideas of modernity. Ferguson’s chapter on urban style is especially rich in insights. He argues that among urban men there are two major cultural styles, which he terms localist and cosmopolitan. He sees cultural style as a “performative competence,” similar to linguistic dialect or accent, which “tends to stick with a person” (p. 96). He is suggesting, then, that “localist” and “cosmopolitan” styles are performative aspects of daily life, not values or worldviews. Although he recognizes the possibility of code-switching, or of being able to perform different styles in different settings, Ferguson argues that the ability to do this is limited to a few “virtuosos.” Language and clothing are especially key; Ferguson suggests that a person who speaks urban Bemba may not have the linguistic competence to perform, and be accepted, in a rural area he claims as “home.”

Here, as elsewhere, Ferguson goes beyond the Zambian case to make claims for all of urban Africa. Although he states that he is not equating “cosmopolitan” with “Western,” he also argues that “de facto, cosmopolitan styles in urban Africa are dominated by Western and Western-derived cultural forms” (p. 108). He discusses dress and fashion in some detail. No single pattern based on Western style is found throughout urban Africa. In urban Nigeria, for example, cosmopolitan fashions vary with the context and, for the most sophisticated occasions, consist of clothes derived from “traditional” attire, not from Western styles.

This brings me back to my initial questions. Ferguson presents a set of stimulating and important theoretical ideas, which lead to insights about the culture and style of contemporary urban Zambians but which also lead to more questions than answers about how such perspectives apply to urban Africa, more generally.